Yesterday I decided to put the new laptop through its paces with some complicated video work – just to see how well it performed.
I have a couple of collector’s item DVDs in my collection, and I’ve been wanting to do some fancy video processing on them like cleaning up the NTSC noise, doing some timing work, and upscaling them to 1080p. The M1 Max CPU in my laptop is, in theory, just the right tool for the job.
I started off the evening with a simple transcode of a ‘standard definition’ DVD to H264 using my external USB DVD reader/writer just to see if it was possible… See, even though DVD is basically a dead format at this point, I still need to contend with things like DRM and most of the really good utilities for this aren’t exactly ARM-native code.
It turns out that my old standby, HandBrake, has a beta for an ARM-native version, so I gave that a whirl.
The first pass was a simple read of the stream from the DVD, upscaling it to 1080p with a selection of deblocking and NTSC filters, and writing it out to the laptop’s drive as an H264 file in an MKV container.
It did this at about 116 frames per second, which is about four times the regular playback speed.
Impressive, but I didn’t manage to push the CPU past 30% while doing this; something was being a bottleneck… And that something was the USB2 DVD rom.
So for my next test I ripped the movie from the DVD to a single MPEG2 A/V stream on the local SSD using VLC, then ran HandBrake against that with the above upscaling and filter configuration…
It transcoded a 1 hour and 29 minute movie in 4 minutes 14 seconds.
Wow.
This actually managed to push the processor in the laptop; it did in fact get warm and the fans came on… Not that I could hear the fans mind you, I just got an indication of their RPM changing from zero in Sensei.
Okay, so Apple wasn’t kidding – this thing is fast. So – what else can it do?
I’d recently spotted some development code someone was working on that did machine-learning interpolation of video to upscale the frames per second by adding ‘tweening’ between frames. What this does is dramatically smooth out the motion of the video using “AI”, but it would require getting under the hood a bit in MacOS.
So, I spent an hour or so carefully massaging things to get the interpolation code to run and, it worked! Until it didn’t and my laptop kernel panicked…
The resultant force-reboot and subsequent attempt by MacOS to ‘fix’ what I’d done cratered the OS. Luckily, TimeMachine was available to save the day.
At about 11pm I had the Laptop back up and running from the 5pm snapshot and everything seems okay.
I think I’ll wait a bit before trying the frame interpolation code again. 🙂
Having nothing better to do, and being tired of staring at the walls, today I decided to move some funds around and go for a drive…
The route was simple; I-225 north to I-70, then west to Golden.
I spent a lot of weekends at my grandmother’s place in Golden growing up, and part of my 11th grade year as well. And I’ve not been back there in probably two decades – so, why not go sightsee? And from there I’d just randomly make my way back across Denver to home…
The drive would have been nice if it weren’t for all the people. See, I don’t recreationally leave the house unless it’s to head away from civilization – so I don’t get to experience the anthill that Denver has become very often.
Today’s route took me right through Denver on I-70, so I got to see all of the homeless camps everywhere, the perpetual traffic jam on the highways through town, and the general shitshow that is the average metropolis in the 2020’s.
In case it’s not clear, I wasn’t impressed.
Once I got to the west side of Denver though, traffic lightened up and I hit almost 60 mpg as I entered Golden on highway 58. I took the back way to the old house through the subdivision that was springing up at the base of north Table Mesa in ’86; most of the mountainside is now houses of course.
The old house on East street is kind of a dump now and the current owner doesn’t seem to care too much about it. And they were in the garage with the door up, so I felt it would be creepy to stop and take a picture…
I drove from there down the route I would take to school; Ford street to Jackson street to Golden High School.
Golden high School apparently got a remodel some time in the past as it’s no longer the run-down 1950’s campus mess it was when I went there. It’s quite a ways back from the street now, and it actually looks pretty nice. And the parking lot is a lot bigger, so the students don’t need to park on all the streets around the school.
I then followed south Golden road down to 6th ave.
Over the years they’ve added a half dozen roundabouts along south Golden rd, which kind of complicates things that didn’t need to be complicated – but such is the way things go. The car dealership where I got my first car is still there though, as is the McDonalds I used to get lunch at a couple times a week.
As I crossed Colfax I briefly thought about taking it east, back to the Aurora side of Denver, but given how bad the traffic was on I-70 to get to Golden I figured attempting the reverse on surface streets was a really bad idea.
So I took 6th ave east to I-25, past Red Rocks Community College where I took AP data entry and computer science back in 1986…
After I’d aced the placement test, I got to ride a bus over there every other morning to work on professional grade hardware.
It also got me a login for the terminal system they were using for the data entry portion of the class, which I quickly discovered had levels of access…
To make a long story short, this was my first legit “system hack”. I gave myself supervisor privileges on the school’s S/36 by way of finding an overflow in the classroom application’s user menus that caused the session to drop to an unprotected command line…
This led to my getting a talking to from a system administrator… But it was more of a head-pat because he was impressed that I had figured out the S/36 on the fly with no manual or instruction. And this ended with me getting to spend time on the actual mainframe instead of doing data entry – as long as I promised to lay off the hacking.
I did a lot of tape loading, but I also got to write and run some of my own code on the IBM 308X that lived in a pressurized airlocked elevated floor cleanroom. It was basically about as high-tech as it got, and I had access.
Good times.
I headed east on 6th ave and got off on I-25 south, and slogged my way to south Colorado Blvd.
Heading a ways south on south Colorado Blvd. lead me to Action Computers; a place I worked at in 1995. I decided being as I was there I should at least stop in, say hi, and have a look around…
Unfortunately, early Friday someone had backed up to the front doors, wrapped a tow chain around the handles, and pulled out most of the front of the store… They then cleaned out a good portion of the inventory.
So the front of the place is boarded up and there’s not a lot in the store – and neither Mark nor Allen were there to say hi to. So I nosed around a few laptops before heading out and making my way back home.
Home was a bit further south on south Colorado Blvd, east on east Hampden Ave., south on I-25, north on I-225, and then south on Parker rd.
I stopped at the local McDonalds and got a quarter pounder with cheese and some fries, and ate them in the car as a bit of a wayback moment.
All in all I burned probably $8 in gas and spent $12 on lunch… $20 well spent I guess.
This morning’s breakfast is “Le Peep”; there’s one just south of my place on Parker road, but I’ve not eaten there until this morning.
I think the last time I ate at Le Peep was probably the early 80’s in Longmont… Back then the place had just escaped Aspen, so it was kind of designed (and priced) for SoCal women visiting their Aspen house with their staff and designer dogs.
It was good, but back then $15 for breakfast was borderline insanity, and no one in Longmont even knew what an avocado was let alone why it should be an ingredient in everything on the menu.
Fast forward 40 years and the prices haven’t really changed much, the ambiance of the place is about the same, and there’s an avocado in pretty much every dish – but the clientele are now the median age of Joe Biden.
While waiting for my to-go order a balding fellow with an ironic ponytail and an actual Izod polo shirt walked in and was seated… I assume he’s been eating at LePeep since the 80’s. Then there was the elderly lady who spent the entire time I was waiting attempting to park her beige late 80’s 300-series Mercedes; she must have pulled in an out of the handicap space a half dozen times while I watched – mostly because my car was next to the handicap spot and I was expecting a costly confrontation at any moment.
She evidently gave up because she followed me out of the parking lot and eventually ended up at the IHOP just up the hill. It has RV parking, so might have been easier for her to navigate.
All in all though the food was good when I got it home. I ordered the ala carte biscuits and gravy with a scrambled egg and a side of sausage, and it was pretty inexpensive for what I got; $17 including the mandatory tip (for a carry out order)…
I was initially going to get the biscuits and gravy menu item, but they don’t offer scrambled eggs anywhere but ala carte… Only peasants eat their eggs scrambled I guess. 🙂
Taken with my Nokia 6300 4G, and this is as good as the camera gets – it’s like being in the late 90’s again!
I’ve taken to topping off the gas tank in the car every week just because it feels less expensive to spend smaller amounts more often… I know it’s not, but don’t ruin it for me.
So, I only used one and a quarter gallons this week, which was a mere $5… Not bad, even with the current levels of crazy in the world.
And it’s pretty typical really; I can finally leave the house without a space suit, but now it’s too expensive to leave the house.
Listening to "Boy Blue" by Electric Light Orchestra
Well, I’ve had my first encounter with selling something on ebay.
For the most part, it’s pretty painless… I wanted to sell an old motherboard and my old Cintiq tablet to make a little extra cash for frivolous things like groceries. So I took a few photos, filled out the forms, and listed them.
One thing ebay doesn’t mention until you’ve actually sold something is that they take 13 percent of the profit right off the top, plus another 30 cents for some generally opaque reason. So, for the $700 motherboard I sold for $600, ebay sucked up $77.70 – and I had to pay for shipping, so I’ll net about $500. And after all is said and done I’ll get about $250 for my old Cintiq.
Not great, but it beats sitting on this stuff for no real reason I guess.
Now I’m waiting for ebay to release the money… See, I’ve never sold anything via ebay so I’m suspect I guess. This means there’s a hold on the funds until some algorithm somewhere is satisfied that I’m not ripping people off.
I’m not in a hurry, so it’s okay – but the first brush with ebay leaves a bit to be desired.
I also put my PC up on Craig’s List for a few days; but as I expected it’s just too expensive and too “one-off” for the general population; few people get why a Xeon Gold 6312U CPU costs $1200, and a 3090 is around $2500 right now. A $5000 PC just isn’t a popular item currently…
But, my roommate decided he wanted it, and will be making payments for a while. So while I didn’t get an instant payoff of the new M1 Max laptop, it’s covered – it’ll just take a year or so.
The casual observer of ye olde blog here might have noticed that I’m kinda into this computer thing… I mean, I’ve been doing computery stuff since the late 70’s after all.
For me, it all started when my father got an OSI “Challenger 1P” in ’78 or ’79. Now, I wasn’t allowed to come within arm’s reach of this machine because my father was a bit territorial and no one was allowed to touch his stuff… But the fact it was in the house was enough to get my interest and get me reading up on it.
The next machine to enter my life was a Tandy TRS-80 model 1 my father brought home in 1980. It was the same story in that I wasn’t allowed to touch it, but the TRS-80 had a lot more documentation and it was easier to read up on it.
In 1981 I entered Junior High…
At school there were four Commodore PET machines in vacant a corner office, and no one did anything with them. They had clear vinyl dust covers on them when I found them, leading me to guess that A) even the teachers didn’t have any idea how to use them and B) that meant it was okay for me to monkey with them.
Remember, this is the mimeograph and overhead transparency era, so something like a personal computer just didn’t fit into the curriculum – yet.
I would spend the occasional recess in that corner office figuring out the vagaries of loading things from tape and playing with the classroom programs the machines came with.
Eventually though, with relentless pestering (and probably assuming I would soon void the hands-off policy on his machines), my father finally caved and bought me a Sinclair ZX-81 for Christmas in 1981.
The ZX-81 was a $99 kit in 1981, which is about three hundred dollars in 2022 money, and that really got me started on both hardware and software systems. I also became even more of a social outcast by adding ‘geek’ to my already well-worn ‘nerd’ moniker from being a gamer.
I found that I had a legitimate talent with computers, and by the end of my first month I’d written my first text adventure based on my AD&D world… The problem with the ZX81 is it had no storage when I got it, so everything I wrote I wrote on paper and typed in every time I wanted to run it.
My father eventually gave me his old Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, and I got that plugged into the ZX81 to save and load stuff. And a month or two after that, the routine showing off of things I’d written prompted my father to get me a 16K ram expansion and an actual keyboard for the ZX-81. And by summer I had filled my big tape case with software I’d written for the thing.
Some time in 1982 I managed to score a Commodore VIC-20 – I think via my grandmother for my birthday… The VIC-20 was a $299 machine in 1982, which is roughly a grand in 2022 dollars – so it was a pretty impressive thing to have.
The VIC was where things really started to take off for me with computers; it had a pretty descent processor that was the emerging industry standard for personal computing (6502), enough ram to be useful, a nice keyboard, and enough bells and whistles to be entertaining to write things for.
In 1984 I started High School at Skyline… Probably my favorite part of starting High School was that Skyline had a computer class – if you could call it that…
Computer Operation and Data Entry was an elective, and it was integrated into the math department. And even though the school had owned a half-dozen Apple IIe machines for a couple of years at this point, the class is really self-study because no one in administration had a clue what to do with the systems.
The computer lab itself was right off of the library, on the second floor, so it was easy to get books and take them to the desk for reference.
Most of the self-study course work used Apple Logo, which bored me to death, but I could get the lesson done in 5-10 minutes, do the typing drills really quick, and then move on to my own projects… The machines at the school also had “Koala Pads” which, while primitive, kinda got me into the tablet thing decades before tablets were a thing…
Outside of school I’d been working in 6502 assembly for a year or so, using the VicMon cartridge on my VIC-20 (I blew past BASIC in a couple of months because BASIC eats up too much of the limited VIC-20 memory). The Apple machines also used a 6502, so most of my time on the school’s Apple IIe’s was either learning stuff I was interested in (D/A converters were my thing in 10th grade, I wanted to build a robotic arm), working on my own programs, or reverse-engineering games to see how they work.
My first legit ‘software hack’ was in 1985, on those machines at Skyline… Using a hex editor, I removed the copy protection from a friend’s copy of “Karateka” so that I could play it too.
A couple of times up there in the computer lab I got so focused on whatever it was I was working on that I missed my next class, which was Graphic Design. Fortunately, it was another elective, and I wasn’t too worried about it.
This was the beginning of the end of school for me. I started to evaluate electives by how much time they took away from whatever hardware or software project I was working on…
For my machines at home, I’d been trying to talk my parents into springing for a Commodore 64 now that they’d come down in price – mostly to get my hands on the 6510 and its extra I/O lines… But then I saw some news about Atari’s new “XL” series, and they looked pretty sweet.
And then there was Apple’s ad for the “Macintosh”, which was amazing, and the whole ‘mouse’ and ‘graphical user interface’ thing looked absolutely killer… There’s no way I could get one though as they were really, really expensive; $2500 in 1985 dollars or $6700 in 2022.
I really wanted a 68000-based machine though… Someday!
In 1985 my grandmother passed away and left her house in Golden to my father and my aunt. My father bought out my aunt’s half and we moved after my 11th grade year had started at Skyline.
During the 1985 upheaval I got an Atari 800XL as something of a concession prize from my parents, which I updated with two Happy-mod 1050 disk-drives and an XM301 300 baud modem.
I had that 800XL until after I had enlisted and moved to my duty station, so July-ish of 1987. A guy in the barracks had an Apple Macintosh Plus though, and I spent a pretty decent amount of time messing with it. It was greyscale, but I still really, really, really wanted a 68K based system now.
I finally got a 68K machine in September of 1989, in the form of an Amiga 500. My ex-wife and I gave that Amiga a helluva workout over the next couple of years…
I finally replaced the Amiga with an IBM PC in late 1993, mostly for my BBS efforts. And then in 1994 I started work at “Intelligent Electronics”, where things really took off.
At one point in late 1995 my living room / computer cave contained a PowerMac 8100/100 (PowerPC), an HP9000 C110 (PA-RISC), a DEC AlphaStation (DEC Alpha), an SGI Indy (MIPS), and probably a half dozen assorted generic PCs in various states of assembly.
I wasn’t happy with learning one architecture, I wanted to learn ALL the architectures!
August 1995
March 13th, 1997 – file server, Internet server with ISDN router and 56K backup, and the BBS server
March 13th, 1997 – my ‘art station’ with my HUGE digitizer
This sort of madness continued into 1997 when I sold off a lot of it to move to Virginia.
Post-move things calmed down a bit with regard to weird computers and architectures. I tended to use an Apple PowerMac 6500/225 for my personal machine and a handful of Pentium II and III-based machines for games and Internet stuff… The weirdest thing was probably the DEC Multia VX40 I was using as the email server…
In 1998 I picked up an Apple PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) and used that as my “personal” computer for a couple of years. I also had a couple of generic PCs that I used for EverQuest duty.
In February 2000, after we’d all survived the Clockpocalypse of 2000 and right before I moved to northern Connecticut for a teaching job, the G3 Wallstreet was traded out for a G3 Pismo.
By 2003 the G3 laptop had gotten pretty long in the tooth, so I sold it to pick up a rather generic Compaq S5000 machine and an Nvidia FX 5600 at the local Best Buy (Mostly to play Shadowbane and Horizons on), and then gave the Compaq to Robin before jetting back to Virginia in February of 2004.
In late February 2004 I picked up the first 17″ PowerBook G4, which turned out to have a screen defect…
Apple replaced it and I used the second 17″ G4 until shortly after I started at where I currently work… They wanted me to do PC things, so I needed a PC, so in early October 2004 I sold the PowerBook and bought yet another generic PC.
This sort of thing has continued on for nearly two decades now; around my birthday I’ll get a new Mac because I like Macs – and then some time during the next year I’d sell it and get a PC for a while.
The PCs are usually pretty generic gaming rigs filled with whatever the latest Intel is and some cutting edge video card – so they aren’t really worth mentioning. The Macs though can usually be used to reference a specific point in time as they are specific models… So here’s the full list:
Powerbook 165c in 1994 (still have)
PowerMac 8100/100 in 1995 (sold)
PowerMac 6500/225 in 1997 (sold)
PowerBook G3 Wallstreet in 1998 (sold)
PowerBook G3 Pismo in 2000 (still have)
17″ PowerBook G4 in 2004 (still have)
17″ iMac G5 in 2004 (still have)
20″ iMac in 2006 (sold)
24″ iMac in 2008 (sold)
13″ MacBook in 2010 (still have)
27″ iMac in 2013 (sold)
17″ MacBook Pro in 2014 (sold)
11″ MacBook Air in 2015 (still have)
15″ MacBook Pro in 2019 (sold)
16″ MacBook Pro in 2019 (traded in)
27″ iMac in 2020 (traded in)
13″ M1 MacBook Air in 2020 (sold)
And the latest M1 Max powered 16″ MacBook Pro this year…
That’s a slightly crazy amount of money spent on Macs – though I tend to sell the Macs for close to what I paid for them, or trade them in at Apple for the bigger better machine – so it’s not as bad as it looks.
Still, Apple should give me some stock or something for being such a long time customer. 🙂
A bonus photo of every Macintosh CPU line Apple has used, all running side by side:
Left to right: Motorola 68030 running System 7.1, Motorola PowerPC G4 running OSX 10.5.8, Intel Core 2 Duo running MacOS 10.13.6, Apple M1 running MacOS 11.0.1
Over the years I’ve collected a great many things, and most of them involve my various stories in writing and roleplay and tend to be artwork of various settings and the characters who inhabit them.
Since 2008 or so I’ve primarily used Second Life as the engine for my stories and settings because I can build them in 3D for the enjoyment of anyone interested.
In 2011 I set up a little place called “Trotsdale” for the fans of the pop-culture phenomenon that was “Gen 4” MLP – but as a different place with different stories and heroes from the TV show.
Initially the location was to simply be a town where players could hang out and soak in the ambiance of a place similar to the TV show. The town proper was mostly built by a fellow on SL named OldVamp who was my right-hand man for the whole thing. None of it would have went very far without his help.
In any roleplay setting you need a ‘storyteller’ character to illustrate the world and it’s history for the players, and in MLP this function is fulfilled by Alicorns… So, I had to make my own, and Aurora was created.
After a year or so I decided to expand the setting to the lands Aurora controlled, and this became the setting of Roanoak, of which Aurora was Empress.
Aurora has had a bunch of very epic artwork made of her – mostly concerned with her talent and the history of her lands…
Aurora closes a wild rift in the Broken Leylands north of RoanoakAurora closing the rift between the far future and the present; the event that set up the second chapter of my Second Life MLP adventure. Painless, Aurora’s confidant and a good friend of mine, is the big astral wolf. The three tapestries depicting the First War and the origin story of the setting’s ‘big bad’, Metus.
Roanoak ran for about four years until, in 2015, some friends of mine wanted to start a new roleplay setting in Second Life – one based upon the fanfiction “Fallout Equestria”.
I was happy enough to oblige, and using the backstory set up years earlier rolled Roanoak’s clock forward about 200 years…
In doing this though, I had to move beyond Aurora’s world and Aurora herself. And through a complicated series of events, Iridae came onto the scene to illustrate the next chapter.
Unlike Aurora, who the players met in the middle of the story, Iridae began along with the players… Initially she was a unicorn, and through a year long series of trials and tribulations eventually became Aurora’s successor. Iridae got the same all-star treatment as Aurora, but this time the art included physical items…
Iridae had a confidant as well, though this time it was a robot named “Fork” who was brilliantly played by a fellow in Australia.The famous Iridae plush… This is about two feet tall and is fully articulated – even her tail is jointed.And an 8-inch tall maquette of Iridae
My ‘pony period’ in SL was from 2011 to 2021 – a decade of world building and adventure imagined, penned, and often built by yours truly… It was a pretty epic time and was filled with fantastic people – and the conventions and general vacation trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas just to hang out with them were equally memorable.
I kind of miss it, truth be told. But as I enter year two of my forced vacation from the second job that it was, I’m content to continue missing it.
Listening to "The Grey Havens" by The Lord of the Rings & James Galway
Under that snow is probably a half of an inch of ice as it rained for a few hours last evening before getting below freezing all night. So, I’m not driving into the office today unless it’s an emergency…
I just don’t see the sense in risking a $30,000 car for the opportunity to sit in a different office and do exactly the same thing I do right here in my home office.
That and it gives me a chance to finish moving into the new MacBook Pro before the 10am Teams meeting…
Yep, back on a Mac – specifically the top-end 16″ M1 Max 32-core GPU version – for a couple of reasons.
My PC is currently worth about $7000, or about $3000 more than I paid for it. If I can find someone to buy it, that more than covers the cost of the new $4000 laptop.
My PC uses a bit over 150watts at idle and 600watts at full-tilt, which with the increases in utility cost is slightly painful each month. The MacBook on the other hand tops out at 140watts.
My PC is basically a space heater I can plug a monitor into, which in the summer will suck as I need to run the AC as little as possible to keep costs down. The MacBook basically generates no heat.
My circa 2014 UPS has finally failed and replacing it is $250. The MacBook comes with a built-in 6-10 hour UPS.
And lastly, Windows 11 is just “okay” as an OS, but gets immeasurably worse when Microsoft adds all kinds of unavoidable advertising to it. MacOS is the better OS in broad strokes, but also isn’t an ad platform with a file browser tacked onto it.
Overall, the new MacBook is nice; great CPU/GPU, super nice screen, and the build quality is just as stellar as always… But the return of some actual ports is my favorite part, one of which is an actual SD card slot! So it’s really easy to get photos off of my cameras!
The above pictures came from my Canon G12, in fact… I still need to get Photoshop installed so that I can do the lens correction for it.
Overall the new MacBook really, really reminds me of my old G4 PowerBook; it’s chunky, heavy, has actual ports, and is kinda bleeding edge for {current year}.
I’ve had a lot of cars over the years; in fact, I’ve been accused of changing cars like some people change pants…
It all started with a friend of the family, John Zweygardt or “Johnny Z” to those that knew him – Vietnam vet, motor head, and general wild man who lived up in the hills and was somehow associated with my dad.
He used to ‘borrow’ me in the early 70’s and go get icecream or burgers, and I’d sit on his lap and steer his corvette down the local dirt roads while he worked the gas and brakes… It made my mom furious, but we did it all the time.
He also drove a really amazing Harley, and here’s a picture of me sitting on it in 1974.
In 1976, or thereabouts, he was involved in getting me a used go-cart for my birthday. It was red pipe-framed thing, single seat, with the engine on a centrifugal clutch driving one of the rear wheels. I remember it being picked up in Broomfield, and I got to ride it exactly one time.
On my first outing on the go-cart, under supervision mind you, I drove it into a fence across the street from the trailer on Francis street. The event happened at a pretty slow speed, but my mom still completely freaked out… For the remainder of the go-cart’s life it was chained and padlocked in the back yard so that mom could tell Johnny Z that I still had it – and then skirt around the fact I wasn’t allowed to even sit on the thing.
In 1980 I spent a summer with Johnny Z up at his ranch in the hills, and this is where I learned proper manual transmission operation on Johnny Z’s CJ5; heel and toe to downshift, clutch-less shifts by rev-matching, and other assorted driving skills.
Anyway, time passed and in August 1985 I came of age to get my learner’s permit…
My mom insisted on giving me lessons, which entailed about 3 minutes of warnings followed by me flawlessly executing her route – even the parallel parking bit. She knew that I was into cars, but had forgotten that I’d been ‘driving’ since I could hold a steering wheel thanks to Johnny Z.
And that takes us to my first car in February of 1986 – a 1969 Toyota Corona.
I split the cost of it with my parents, which wasn’t hard considering it was a whopping $300. It was metal flake blue, but the paint was an Earl Scheib job and they didn’t strip the wax off of the factory white paint… So, the blue paint was literally coming off of the car in blue sparkly confetti as I drove it down the street.
It was a 4-door with some huge yet anemic straight 4 and a two-speed automatic that collectively made for a car that couldn’t get out of its own way. But, when it’s your first car you don’t care.
I drove the Corona around until I left for the Navy in July of 1986, and then as soon as I was settled on the base in Groton, or April of 1987, I picked up a cream-colored 81 Chevy Citation from another sailor for a song… He was shipping out to Bangor and it would cost more to move the car than it was worth, so $100 later I owned it…
It was a total basket case though and about a month after I bought it the transmission grenaded right here.
So, in June of 1987 I found another car for sale on-base from another sailor in a similar situation, a red 1978 Chevy Chevette for $250. This car got the paint restored, new inch wider black and chrome rims on lower profile tires, new instrumentation, new seats, and my first high end stereo work that centered around a clarion head unit, infinity speakers, and a collection of pioneer amps.
I drove the wheels off of the Chevette before trading it in for a 1989 Chrysler LeBaron coupe in September of 1989. The LeBaron was my first new car and was a dark copper color with light brown interior – and I was in love with the thing.
The LeBaron was the car I had when I met my future ex-wife, and it was used to make at least a dozen 250-mile round trips from New London CT to Framingham MA and back to move her from her ex’s parents place or visit her friends. Many of those road trips were done to the Transformers: the movie sound track.
The LeBaron was replaced with a black and gold ‘85 Chevy S10 when I got out of the Navy in October 1990.
The first year out of the Navy was a total blur; I had like ten different short-term jobs, moved half as many times, and tried desperately to get my life in order between the economic hellscape of the early 90’s and my ex creating a lot of additional issues.
The S10 was replaced by an arrest-me red 1988 Nissan 300ZX turbo in 1992 after I landed a job at EDCON… But when EDCON laid me off later in the year I had to give up the 300ZX.
The 300ZX was replaced in late 1992 with a green late 70’s Ford LTD wagon that I picked up as a handyman special. I limped the LTD along until I landed a maintenance job at Townview Plaza in mid 1993. Townview Plaza was right across the street from Mile High Stadium, and I made friends with the owner of the towing company we used to haul off illegal parkers every home-game. He ran a used car lot on Federal and gave me first pick of anything I wanted for what he had in it.
I quickly replaced the LTD with a sketchy but functional yellow and black 1977 Fiat X-1/9. This was the car that we refer to as being ‘hippie powered’ because as a 2-seater Matt (Icedragon from the BBS) and I would drive up to pick up Noah (‘Shaman’ from the BBS) and he’d have to ride in the frunk (the x-1/9 is mid-engine and the trunk is actually in the front of the car). When we’d come to a stop in town, he’d stand up out of what looked like the engine compartment to stretch – and freak out everyone at the light.
The Fiat had vapor lock issues that I never could resolve, so in May of 1994 I traded a 1gig hard drive for a bronco-orange 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit and set aside the Fiat to be worked on.
The Rabbit passed on after a couple of months though. (the rod for the butterfly valve in the carb sawed through and dropped into a cylinder on I-25 – I was able to coast over to the side of the highway, which is where the car was left)
I managed to get the Fiat running well enough in July of 1994 to be a good trade for a burgundy ’84 Mercury Marquis.
This is what I drove when, in August of 1994, I left Townview Plaza to pursue what I was actually trained to do; computers. I had landed a job at Intelligent Electronics (I.E.) for third shift assembly, where I built IBM “EduQuest” machines all night. With this new job I moved across town to a mobile home in north Aurora.
While at I.E. I quickly went from line assembly to line supervisor, to Q.A., to I.T. – each with associated pay raises… I’d also gotten a roommate who also worked at I.E. and we were carpooling using his Jeep Wagoneer (a better choice in winter), so I sold the Marquis in March of 1995 and bought a 1972 VW beetle as a new project car.
In April of 1995 I was hired away by Action Computers on Colorado Blvd. to build their repair department with Matt (Chimles from the BBS). Fortunately, the Bug was in a state where I could drive it back and forth reliably.
During the time at Action Computers I dropped a modded 1600 in the bug, lowered the front end, took an inch out of the pillars, and repainted it with a metal flake deep pine green. I also picked up a 1974 Porsche 914 as the next project car as it and the bug shared a lot of parts.
In January 1996 I bail on Action Computers and return to Intelligent Electronics where I assumed control of their network operations, and I basically ran all of the technical aspects of the company until Ingram Micro decided to buy the place in ’97.
When Ingram purchased I.E. I was left with a choice; move to Memphis or find another job. I’d been talking to Scott (from FurryMUCK) for a couple of years and we’d even met up at a couple of conventions. The company he worked at, Amerind, in D.C. was looking for a network guy and Scott could put me up while I shopped around…
So, I sold off the Bug, the Porsche, and everything else I figured I didn’t need, boxed up the rest to ship to the East Coast, and hopped a flight to Maryland in June of 1997.
I worked at Amerind for a couple of months before Scott and I struck out on our own and formed “PFM Technologies”, where we created pure fucking magic for anyone willing to pay us. From our farm in Rhoadesville VA we created some really amazing things, such as the most advanced vending machine on the planet.
Given the stupid money we were making I picked up a yellow 1967 Ford Mustang to hotrod and a 28-foot Scarab offshore racer.
Then the tech bubble burst in 2000, and Scott and I moved to the yacht we had in Balitmore. I gave the Mustang to a business partner and traded the Scarab for a burgundy 1991 Chevy Caprice to move my worldly belongings in. The Caprice went from Baltimore to Marianapolis Prep in northern Connecticut, then to Denver, then to Vail, and then back to Denver…
I had that Caprice through January 24th, 2004, when I gave it to Robin and Tad to help them out of a jam. It was promptly stolen out of their driveway about a month later…
The next car was a blue ‘87 Honda Civic I picked up on my second ill-fated sojourn to Virginia. This time it was February 20th, 2004 and the plan was to take over a tech school – which fell through in spectacular fashion…
Dan, who was financing the endeavor, knew that I’d basically sold everything I owned and flew across the US to try and make his school idea go, so he gave me the car as a bit of an apology I think. Anyway, I signed the paperwork for the Civic and its more than 170,000 miles on March 15th 2004.
Unfortunately, the Honda was pure mechanical crap. Luckily, three days before making my escape from Virginia Dan swapped it out for a forest green 1994 Toyota Corolla. I signed the papers for the Corolla on April 26th 2004.
The next car came from helping Scott escape Virginia a year and a half later. I flew out to Richmond on December 26th of 2005, hopped into his ‘spare’ black 2004 turbo PT Cruiser, and arrived with him in his ‘other’ black ‘GT’ PT Cruiser at 9am on December 28th. For this (and getting him a job where we still work) he signed over the ‘spare’ PT to me, and I signed over the Toyota Corolla to Jae, my roommate at the time, as a Christmas present.
The PT was a really great car, but it wasn’t so great in winter and Scott had ended up on dialysis three times a week – so I decided to pick up something guaran-damn-teed to get to Davita despite Colorado’s wacky weather.
Enter the 1976 Jeep Cherokee I affectionately named “The Warwagon”. I picked it up for $2000 on November 16th 2007 in a functional but ‘needs work’ state. The Warwagon would become a big-block V8 powered, two feet of ground clearance, three ton monster during the time I owned it.
On January 10th, 2010, the PT was totaled by a lady in a red Jaguar in far too much of a hurry.
I ended up in the hospital for a day to get checked out, and was ultimately okay. I sold the PT for scrap and sold the Warwagon to buy a red soft-top and half-door 2010 Jeep JK Rubicon in March of 2010 – my second “new” car.
The Jeep was great, but I hooked up with an old flame in 2012 and she didn’t like it, so exactly two years after buying the Jeep I traded it in on a much more stylish pearl white 2012 Chrysler 300 ‘S’.
The 300 lasted about a year longer than the relationship before it was traded in, in March 2014, for a far more economical, inexpensive, and entertaining white and red Fiat 500 ‘Abarth’
I modified that Abarth into a 1900-pound, 230 horsepower track-day monster… It was quite possibly the second most entertaining car I’ve ever owned.
Then I had my midlife crisis in January 2017, and, on a whim, decided to purchase a ‘magnetic black’ 2017 Nissan 370Z Nismo.
The 370Z also got a serious wrenching from me, and while less bonkers then the Abarth was still a stupidly quick and agile car. The biggest problem the 370Z had was it was so achingly pretty I was almost to paranoid to drive it anywhere… I’d have to park it amongst mere mortals on occasion, and I dreaded coming out of a store to a scratch on it.
The bigger problem was that I now had two fire-breathing racecars in a state that spends over half the year covered in snow and where all wheel drive is really a requirement… And I just purchased some property down in southern Colorado where the roads absolutely require ground clearance.
So, I succumbed to adulthood and sold the Abarth and then traded the 370Z in for a pearl white 2018 Nissan Murano AWD “Midnight Edition” in July of 2018…
I was pretty happy with the Murano. It was still fun to drive, but also got 40mpg on the highway. It was stylish and full of super comfy leather and advanced electronics, but still extremely capable in any weather and road surface…
Then the zombie apocalypse happened in 2020 and the Murano wound up sitting in the garage for the next year and a half, where it didn’t quite fit because it was pretty huge. Then in 2021 we got a new regime in Washington and the economy went tits-up…
One of the side effects of zombies and the economy was that top-trim models of used cars had suddenly become worth as much as they were when they were new, so I decided to down-size in July of 2021. Nissan gave me $6000 more than I owed on the Murano in trade for a smaller and more economical 2021 Kicks SR.
I took delivery of the Kicks a month later on August 18th, 2021.
In my typical fashion I got the top-tier model with all of the bells and whistles, and I’m pretty happy with it.
Currently gas is over $4 a gallon, but the Kicks will go about 400 miles on 10 gallons – so I’m spending about $40 a month in gas even with the insanity going on… Not bad.
For most of my childhood – so the 70’s and early 80’s – radio was a kid’s social media. If you wanted to know what the new fad was, the latest music was, news, culture, whatever – radio was how you did it.
There was also TV, of course, but TVs were expensive so they tended to belong to your parents, and in turn showed what your parents were interested in; usually a game show of some sort. A cheap radio on the other hand could be had for lunch money, and because it was yours it played the stations that played your music.
Your radio also tended to be portable, so you could do you wherever you happened to be – and you could even listen to whatever your social group was into while out and about with them.
Back in those days, the DJ for whatever genera of music you were into occupied an interesting space – they were a disembodied voice that no one could put a face to, but were also a kindred soul for everyone in range of the transmitter who was into that genera. In school, there was as much to-do made about the specific DJ as there was about the music they played.
For me, the radio station of choice was “KBPI” at 105.9 – the “hundred thousand watt blowtorch of the rockies” as they called it.
There were also cassettes of course – everyone had a Walkman in the 80’s… Not many people had an actual Sony Walkman though, as they tended to be pretty expensive. See, anything you could carry that played a cassette and had headphones was a “Walkman” back then, much to the other manufacturers chagrin I’m sure.
But the blue and silver Sony with the orange foam headphones was ‘boss’ at the time, and the pinnacle of coolness. And having an actual Sony Walkman made you conversation-worthy in the school halls… Now, where you got the music for your Walkman was either copying a friend’s mix-tape, or making your own off the radio.
Sure, you could go buy the hot album of the week and then tape the tracks you wanted – but albums were expensive for that 1-2 tracks you were really interested in. And a cassette held 10-12 tracks per side, so that’s a dozen albums you’d need to buy for one tape… So, the better solution was the radio mix-tape, but that required heaps of patience and some skill…
I remember sitting in front of my grandmother’s home stereo on weekends, for hours, finger on the record/pause button, patiently waiting for a song I wanted to record to come on the radio.
It was always my grandmother’s stereo because my father wouldn’t let me within a dozen yards of his stuff, and my receiver at home didn’t have a cassette in it. So, I always enjoyed being shuffled off to my grandmother’s place in Golden on the weekends.
The long and short of it is I found I could get three years of hosting at GoDaddy for a bit less than one year at Dreamhost. And while Dreamhost is really, really good – my site here requires something between the cheap shared hosting and the $300 a year VPS hosting, which they don’t offer.
And with looming WWIII, rampant inflation, an energy crisis, crashing stock markets, a housing bubble, and the general cost of living almost exceeding my income – I need to save money where I can.
I’d actually thought about just shelving the site here, but I have fun with it and now it’s cheap(er) fun.
The problem I’ve run into in exfiltrating my data from Dreamhost is the backup they sent me isn’t complete… It’s missing pretty much the entire last year. So, even though the dump date is February 13th, 2022, the last entries in the database are from March 28th, 2021.
So, I’m thinking I’ll just start again from here. I’ll put the memoirs back up for the occasional curious tourist, and maybe I’ll do a ‘year in review’ for each year leading up to today just to condense things.
Listening to "Thief in the Night" by Yutaka Yamada
